How to prevent HP SIM from scanning the VMotion port

If you run your ESXi hosts on HP hardware and have a look at the vmkernel.log files from time to time then you have probably already stumbled over messages like these:

vmkernel: cpu4:2741)MigrateNet: vm 2741: 1982: Accepted connection from <x.x.x.x>
vmkernel: cpu4:2741)MigrateNet: vm 2741: 2052: dataSocket 0x41002750c600 receive buffer size is 563560
vmkernel: cpu4:2741)WARNING: Migrate: 215: Invalid message type for new connection: 542393671.  Expecting message of type INIT (0).

Instead of x.x.x.x you will see an IP address that might be familiar to you: It belongs to a server that has the HP System Insight Manager (SIM) software installed for inventorying / managing / monitoring hardware devices in your network. This software is commonly used in HP shops, because it does a fairly good job with monitoring the hardware health of your servers and alerting if something is wrong, and this basic functionality is for free.

Read more »

vSphere 4.1 Update 2 released - What's in it for me (and you)

VMware released Update 2 for vSphere 4.1 on Oct 27th. It includes numerous bug fixes for the vCenter server and client (see VC resolved issues) and ESXi (see ESXi resolved issues).

 I will list some of the fixes here, because I personally welcome them very much, and I'm sure that others will feel the same:

• The vSphere client performed badly with Windows 7, because of frequent screen-redraws when the Windows desktop composition feature was enabled. The only workaround was to disable desktop composition while running the vSphere client. This should be fixed now.
• There are multiple fixes and enhancements to ESXi syslogging:
• If ESXi fails to reach the syslog server while booting, it now keeps retrying it every 10 minutes.
• Very long syslog messages (like these produced by the vpxagent ...) are no longer truncated or split into multiple lines. If you are using a third-party solution like Splunk for collecting syslog messages then you will certainly welcome this, because it is nearly impossible to handle split messages correctly with them.
• But the most important issue that is resolved in Update 2 is this: "Virtual machine with large amounts of RAM (32GB and higher) loses pings during vMotion". Uh, what? VMs losing pings when being vMotioned? Yes, this can really happen (without Update 2), and I personally experienced this problem: When one of two clustered Microsoft Exchange 2010 VM with 48GB RAM was vMotioned it lost network connectivity for more than 15 seconds (between 20 and 30% of the vMotion progress) which triggered a cluster failover. We have not yet checked if this particular issue is really resolved now with Update 2, but VMware Support had put us off to it when we complained about that, so there is a good chance ...